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Rupert Murdoch (Fox) on Blogs and Podcasting

The owner of the creepy Fox TV empire spoke before the American Society of Newspaper Editors earlier today, and this is a key part of what he said:

But our internet site will have to do still more to be competitive. For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn't send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.

At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can't vouch for the quality of people who aren't regularly employed by us - and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists, and so long as proper safeguards are utilized, this might be an idea worth exploring.

To carry this one step further, some digital natives do even more than blog with text they are blogging with audio, specifically through the rise of podcasting - and to remain fully competitive, some may want to consider providing a place for that as well.(via Jeff Jarvis's Buzz Machine)

So if the earliest adopters were tech-nerds, and the next round was big biz (still starting) and now the mainstream media is haranguing itself over its slow adoption...I'd say it's time for the rest of us to pick up the pace, no? The "digital natives" rhetoric seems a little creepy, though. So the uber-immigrant wants to make sure his megalopolis is a desirable destination point for the digital natives? Sounds more like colonization than cluetrain.